Business process management (BPM) offers a programmatic structure for designing transactions and executing them using automated decisions, tasks and sequence flows. For example, an insurance company can use BPM to automate the steps involved in processing insurance claims. BPM solutions typically include a process definition tool, an engine that executes process definitions, and tools that aid process monitoring.
A process definition tool allows a process designer to specify a definition of a business process using a particular business process language. One exemplary language is the business process execution language (BPEL). BPEL is intended for business processes that interact with external entities through web service operations. BPEL's messaging facilities depend on the use of the web services description language (WSDL) to describe outgoing and incoming messages.
When a BPEL process is defined, it can be deployed as a web application using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) web services deployment model. The J2EE web services deployment model requires a set of deployment descriptors that define how to deploy and assemble components into a specific environment. The deployment descriptors can also contain information of the components that can specify settings not contained in the code of the components themselves such as initialization parameters and security parameters. The deployment descriptors are typically written manually by developers familiar with the J2EE web services deployment model.